Robert Browne - The Paradise Prophecy

She had been expecting this. After that e-mail from Ozan, she wouldn’t be surprised if all of the remaining guardians went into hiding.

“Is there any way we can contact him? He’s had a death in the family and we’re trying to locate him.”

Not strictly a lie.

The monk gave them a quizzical look. “Family? I was not aware he had any family.”

“His grandfather. He died suddenly and mentioned Brother Philip in his will. We know he won’t be interested in the money, so we need him to sign a document to that effect.”

“As I told you, he isn’t here.”

“Do you mind if we take a look at his sleeping quarters?”

“Why?”

“He may have left something behind that’ll lead us to him,” she said. “This really is important.”

The monk stared at them for a long time, and Callahan wondered if he saw straight through her. But a life devoted to Christ did not necessarily make you clairvoyant.

“We have nothing to hide,” he said and ushered them inside.

The good news: There were no scorch marks on the floor.

The bad news was that his room was not only small, it was also devoid of any personal belongings. Other than a chair and writing table, a neatly made twin bed, a sink and mirror and a mostly empty closet, there wasn’t anything of use here. Nothing that might tell Callahan where Brother Philip had gone.

The only glimmer of hope was the wastebasket under the sink, which had some trash in it. Callahan had done her share of basket diving in the past, to varied success-itineraries, ticket stubs, scribbled phone numbers, boxes of hair dye. They all told a story if you took a moment to work it through.

But all she found in the waste basket were a few used tissues-mmmm, lovely-and a discarded wrapper for a bar of Parrot Soap.

“So much for that idea,” she muttered as she turned to LaLaurie. “You want to do your thing?”

But LaLaurie was already at it, his palm pressed against the writing table, his eyes squeezed shut. He opened them and shook his head. “I’m not getting anything. This room is clear.”

Callahan sighed, ready to call it a bust, when she glanced at the sink. The usual toiletries were there, along with a cup and toothbrush. But what caught her eye was the soap.

It was a fresh bar, which wasn’t surprising, considering the wrapper in the waste can. But what she found unusual was that one corner was flattened, worn down, as if it had been rubbed against something solid.

But what?

She was about to dismiss it when LaLaurie pointed and said, “What’s that?”

There was only one window in the room, but the sunlight filtering in from outside shone directly across the mirror above the sink, which was what LaLaurie was pointing at. Callahan adjusted her angle, and that’s when she saw it.

Soap marks on the glass.

Moving in close, she took a deep breath and huffed warm air across the surface of mirror. It took several tries, but when she was done, the message was clear, written in English:

PROTECT HER

She turned to LaLaurie. “We’re too late. Brother Philip is angel food.”

LaLaurie moved over to the mirror and pressed his hand against the glass, closing his eyes again.

“I’m still not feeling anything. I’m guessing he’s alive.” He looked at Callahan. “But there’s only one reason to leave this message, and it’s the same reason he ran.”

“Which is?”

No smiles now, no drifting gaze. “He knows his time is short.”

Batty liked helicopters even less than he liked small planes. But here he was, sitting in back of a black MH-6 Little Bird, trying to keep his stomach in check as the pilot worked the stick and soared above the slopes of the Loi Lar mountain range.

After leaving Brother Philips’s living quarters, he and Callahan had questioned as many of the monks as they could find. But the rest of Philip’s brethren were just as clueless about his whereabouts as the guy who had greeted them at the front door.

They had pretty much given up, when the cleaning lady followed them outside and told them she’d spoken to Philip the morning he left.

“I come to work and he tell me not to clean his room.” She was a middle-aged Thai woman who couldn’t have been more than four foot five. She yanked at her collar with both hands. “He wear backpack, with food and supply. The one he always carry when he go to worship at the brothers’ retreat.”

“Retreat?” Callahan said.

She nodded. “They close it long time, but the brothers sometime go when they visit the hill tribe.”

“Where? Where do we find it?”

The cleaning lady pointed past the fence toward the lush green peaks of a nearby mountain range.

“There,” she said. “Close to God.” Then she wished them chok dee ka and went inside.

Callahan immediately got on her cell phone and ordered up the helicopter. As they took another tuk tuk to the designated departure point, she opened an app and logged on to a satellite feed.

A moment later she showed Batty what looked like a large stone cross on the side of a mountain near the Doi Inthanon summit.

“Close to God,” she said. “Let’s find out how much good it did him.”

The pilot was a scruffy-looking expat named McNab who did contract work for the U.S. government. He flew with a seasoned hand, but that didn’t keep Batty from feeling the urge to lean out the fuselage door and heave the samurai pork burger he’d gobbled up on their way in from the airport.

He didn’t know what samurais had to do with Thailand, but right now that sickly sweet teriyaki sauce was ripping up his insides like a freshly forged bushido blade.

McNab goosed the controls, then rose over a high ridge. Just beyond it lay a mountainside crowded with teak trees and mountain pine. A narrow dirt trail snaked down its long slope toward the sprawling lowlands, past the terraced rice fields and the rustic villages that the Kariang and Padaung hill tribes called home.

To the northeast lay Burma, which, along with Thailand and Laos, formed the Golden Triangle, once known for its thriving opium trade, but now home to a growing methamphetamine industry.

Banking right, McNab flew them around a large outcropping and found what they were looking for. High on a cliff and carved into the side of the mountain was a crumbling, moss-infested stone temple, fronted by a huge granite cross.

“Wow. That’s quite a sight,” McNab said into his headpiece.

Batty suspected the place was a couple centuries old, carefully built, stone by stone, by overzealous and severely misguided missionaries. The spread of Christianity had largely been a failure in Thailand, and the temple’s remote location would have made it attractive only to the few converted hill tribes or the true believers.

Or to someone trying to hide.

Callahan was sitting up front with McNab. “You think you can put us down somewhere?”

McNab pointed to a small clearing to the right of the entrance. “No worries. There’s more than enough room.”

Less than a minute later they touched down and Batty and Callahan climbed out, ducking low as they passed under the rotors and crossed toward the temple.

Batty was happy to be back on solid ground. He slung his book bag over his shoulder and held it close. Now that he knew the manuscript’s power, he didn’t dare let it go.

The temple’s massive teak doors were hanging open, nothing but darkness beyond them. Callahan moved up the crumbling steps to enter, but Batty held her back.

“Wait,” he said. “I’m not getting a good feeling here.”

“What’s wrong?”

He stood very still, drinking in the temple’s aura, absorbing its long history. There was a richness of spirit to this place-both good and evil-but nothing of immediate concern. The danger he’d felt was merely the remnants from some long past incident.